"PICK UP THAT CAN!" Storytelling in Half-Life 2

The divorce between storytelling and gameplay has plagued video games since birth. Gameplay seems to get the games during the week, and maybe storytelling gets to see them on weekends. While never perfect, this upbringing seemed serviceable through games’ Reagan-era infancy. But games are finally reaching a twenty-first-century adolescence, and they’re developing an identity of their own. And now they ask for not just gameplay, or storytelling! They ask for both! They’ll have their cake and eat it too! They want to bring the parents back together into holy matrimony! But like any awkward teenager, this transformation is rife with missteps. There’s a hope, though, that one day games will inherit the best traits of both storytelling and gameplay to become something greater. Something that no other medium for art can create. Something that matters.

Valve’s Half-Life 2 is the final product of this drawn-out metaphor. I know it's been played to death in game academia circles, but there's a reason for that. It exorcises all of gaming’s storytelling vs. gameplay demons, and creates an art experience that could not be accomplished in any other medium—and isn’t that what all games should strive to do? Its storytelling and gameplay are married beautifully, without sacrifice on either end of the spectrum. First-person shooters have been done before, but none of them perfects this balance the way Half-Life 2 does. Valve’s storytelling immerses the player in the gameplay, and the gameplay immerses the player in the story. How does Half-Life 2 do it?

Raph Koster writes in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design that all games, no matter how little storytelling is involved, require some sort of surrounding fiction. From chess to BioShock, “designers put artwork on [game systems] that is suggestive of some real-world context.” Even in chess, the gameplay is infinitely deep, yet it’s all underneath a fiction of medieval warfare, with queens, pawns, and knights. Early video games featured superficial fictions like this as well, whether it was staving off space invaders or a plumber saving a princess. But at the end of the day, people didn’t play Donkey Kong to get insight into a fat Italian man’s hopes and fears. They played Donkey Kong because the gameplay was fun.

The Stanley Parable as a parallel to Portal, and analyzing linear narratives

This past summer, Davey Wreden's Half-Life 2 mod "The Stanley Parable" was released to a wave of critical acclaim. A one-man project that took two years to create, it explores the concepts of player choice and linear narrative in game design. It's mind-boggling.

If you haven't played it, you owe it to yourself to download "The Stanley Parable" right now. It's free, it doesn't even require Half-Life 2 to play (on the PC), and it takes under an hour to do everything there is to do. There's no shooting aliens involved, so even if you don't play many video games, you can appreciate this one.

During my playthrough of "The Stanley Parable," it struck me that many of these themes were similar to another Half-Life 2 spinoff: Valve's own Portal.

Both "The Stanley Parable" and Portal deal with unreliable narrators who may or may not be characters within the game. Both feature silent protagonists who are a tiny part of a giant corporation.

But why? Why does Half-Life inspire such critiques of gamic narrative? The core Half-Life titles themselves involve a silent protagonist and uncertain overlord character. Valve is often put on a pedestal by the gaming community as the pinnacle of Western game design. Story and gameplay interwoven perfectly, with narrative and character development advanced without need for cutscenes.

I'm tempted to be cynical about this canonization of a game developer. But their work really is that good. And if they inspire someone to create something as chillingly beautiful as "The Stanley Parable," I'm okay with that pedestal Valve sits upon.

It was interesting watching my girlfriend (who doesn't play many games) play "The Stanley Parable." Upon learning the plot's twist, she quit the game and shut off the computer. "That's the only way to win the game," she said. And really, I guess she's right.